Generally, a quorum is defined as the minimum number of members of an assembly or society that must be present at any of its meetings to make the proceedings of that meeting valid. There are many everyday applications where it is desirable that the authorisation power of any one individual is limited and that a number of individuals need to participate together to carry out an authorisation process. What is needed are systems and methods by which such a quorum-based principle is realised for data processing in a computing environment, such as encryption, authentication, data retrieval, access control, etc.